Incidentally, I have been doing this for making bitters for years. I have an ultrasonic cleaner and I fill it with a warm water. Then I put liquor and flavorings in a jar - sometimes grain alcohol, sometimes 151, sometimes strong bourbon, depending on the intended result - and hit it with ultrasound for about 30 minutes at 100F. I make about 2-3 fluid ounces at a time and it works great. Not sure I'd call it (Aging), but it certainly does infuse things well. for certain things, like fresh rosemary, you can see the oils separating from the leaves as soon as the ultrasonic starts. it is nearly instantaneous.
I suspect that the time is a function of surface area. If instead of wood chips they used shavings, I'd bet that they could take the time down even further.
I don't, other than to say that experimentation is easy - I bought my ultrasonic off of eBay. (bigger is better), makes the device more useful.
I use small spice jars for making my batches, and woody things last longer than squishy ones. i.e. orange rind dried is lasts longer than orange rind fresh. However, fresh orange rind gives a different taste and is cool if you're doing a cocktail night, or something. You can do things that you can't do any other way like this.
Cloves, Sassafras root, ginger, juniper berries, rosemary, lavender, sage. All have great effect.
Also, Ultrasonic makes EXCELLENT sangria. This is the only way to do sangria, IMO.
You can either use bitters to add to sangria, or just put wine and other things directly into the ultrasonic and infuse that way. It works great with herbs. For fruits, you should really just use the juice or crush them with a mortar and pestle. Any fruit soaking in the sangria is purely for show. IMO, all sangria should have sage in it. Sassafras in small quantities makes cheap red wine taste about 2 shelves better. YMMV.
This concept is quite well-known in high-end cooking. Nitrogen cavitation is another method of rapidly infusing (though not necessarily aging!) liquids with aromatics.
Ultrasonic boths -- as the OP mentioned -- is also another way of extracting more flavour from liquids. Both concepts are talked about in "Modernist Cuisine" by Myhrvold & co.
Yes - I got the idea from Russell over at the Ice Cream Bar in SF in Cole Valley. They use Nitrogen cavitation for all their extracts using the whipped cream bottles from Isi. I thought "cavitation?" and went to an ultrasonic because I already had one.
This reminds me of some of the goofy aging snake-oil techniques that audiophile-type guitarists try on their guitars. Putting them in vibrating jigs and stuff. That said, if there's a way to significantly tighten / age / enhance the density or resonance of wood using some kind of technique, that's pretty awesome. Then drink aged liquor before playing on aged guitar. Win-win.
I've heard from several musicians that say that it genuinely works. I've also witnessed first hand the "breaking in" process with an instrument that results in a better sound after being played a lot. Note that an old instrument doesn't break in - it is the playing.
I've also heard, from Ed Maday - http://www.edmaday.com - that the vibrations are why he says away from power machinery in his craft - he believes that the use of that machinery might damage the potential tone of the wood. I am skeptical, but if there is a mechanical process involved, then maybe he's not wrong.
Well it might do a little something but in the grand scheme of things, in my opinion, professional of sorts, is that there are far too many variables in the Electric Guitar chain to ever really care too much about any one element. Collectively, yes, different aspects have flavors to add, such as type of wood, age, mass...but then there's all sorts of other aspects - set up height, string quality / material, type of pickups, winding of said pickups, type of amplifier, what effects pedals might be in the chain...so I don't feel like going beyond skepticism is necessarily worth the effort.
By comparison, I had a guitar teacher who would play his G&L Strat 5 days a week for lessons, and you could just see how he was working the fretboard and neck into the sweetest playing, conditioned piece of gear. He always had a line of people waiting to buy his guitar whenever he felt like he wanted a change. I can understand wanting a guitar that "broken in" but by comparison getting something artificially relic'd or aged doesn't seem appealing.
I'd agree - with an electric instrument you rely on resonance, but to a lesser degree than with a violin or cello. I would consider it with an acoustic-only instrument like that.
Yeah I wanted to specify Electric Guitar for that purpose. Acoustic instruments are a whole different design and technique realm. While technically the same family, I view steel string Electric and bronze string Acoustic as two very different instruments.
Gains from pretty much all "advanced" techniques are incremental. Most improvements - whether cars, sports, business, marketing, etc. - come from mastering the basics.
Well sometimes yeah, but I can state without reserve that when I tried a different set of strings - Ernie Ball Cobalt vs. the Slinky, I actually could hear a significant difference. Same goes for changing pick thickness. I think it's important to note that it's really only at the top % where improvements become kind of logarithmic / incremental. 10,000 hours is kind of just a start with guitar.
Aged liquors aren't speaker cables. You can get before/after and old-wood/new-wood flights from distillers to see the difference: age makes a huge difference, and cask type makes a huge difference --- as, apparently, does cask size, according to Chuck Cowdery.
I'm assuming cask size would effect ageing, by altering the surface to volume ratio.
With a wooden beer cask I had (4.5gal) you could taste the vanilla from the wood, which I believe was so prominent because of the small cask size, because of more wood touching the beer.
I'm wondering if the cask size also effects the amount of angels share too.
Although it says "An increased surface to volume ratio of the miniature cask, and increased oxygen concentration, appeared to enhance both extraction and further transformation of wood components, resulting in the dominance of a single characteristic, sweet, after 21 months of maturation." they go on to mention
"maturation of Scotch malt distillate in miniature
casks did not enhance the sensory quality of the final product, nor did miniature casks provide a suitable model of an accelerated Scotch whisky maturation process."
Pre-distressed guitars are sold all the time as "relics". Both Fender and Gibson do it. Their custom shop will relic them to match a particularly famous one or generally.
I would link to a source, but they are all pretty much just advertisements. Your favorite search engine could find them.
I'm curious, it doesn't mention anything about oxidisation, which I thought was pretty important in ageing in casks and I think may be hard to emulate.
Edit: It does mention about acetic acid increasing though interestingly.
According to wikipedia "Ethanol can be oxidized to acetaldehyde and further oxidized to acetic acid", so I'd be interested to know more about how it is formed in this case.
It does seem like there are lots of other by-products of oxidation though:
This reminds me of something I encountered when I used to work in a wine store, which was a sort of copper wand that you would place in a glass of wine and it would "age" the wine. At first I assumed this was snake oil bullshit, but after some research, it turned out there was actually a well documented reaction whereby (IIRC) copper catalyzes the conversion of alcohols into certain ketones and aldehydes, mimicking part of the natural oxidation process.
If you really care about fine nuances of taste, drinking almost anything from metal cups has pretty clear effects. Not aluminum, but things like brass or even various iron alloys. Especially if the drink is slightly acidic.
Regular "food" and "drinks" tend to be pretty complex chemical cocktails, so no wonder they have strange reactions with anything even remotely inclined to react chemically.
Now I wonder if the taste of the original Turkish coffee is related in small part to the usage of tiny copper pots for making it.
Yes this is typically why European foods are thought to be less acidic in taste, the issue was the pewter dinnerware of the aristocracy. Tomatoes were blamed for a while, but all acids will allow the leaching out of lead from the pewter into the food and then usually death followed. Romans actually used this technique to sweeten foods and usually wine. To extend this to the use of general metal ware is straightforward. Though not lead, necessarily, I am sure that heated/acidic drinks will do something to the food taste, and maybe not just via leaching. Egg white, whipped in a copper bowl, will stand up much longer and are more satin-y than in other bowls. It would be most interesting to compare the different metals and choose the ones that most exemplify the desired results; hopefully not lead poisoning though.
Not sure if the tech is the same but Cleveland Whiskey does something similar and is already on the market. Disclaimer: I invested through YC company Wefunder.
I'm not sure they would go that well together; high pressure inhibits cavitation, I'm pretty sure, and cavitation is the primary mechanism by which the ultrasound method extracts the various compounds from the wood. Maybe if you used higher energy ultrasound?
I'm a big fan. Have invested in over 100 companies through FundersClub/Wefunder/Angel.co over the last 4 yrs. Most of them YC companies. Startup investing is a long game, don't really expect meaningful returns until the 7 to 10 yr timeframe. Have backed off a bit recently with a need for more liquidity (kids entering college in the next few years).
Not the parent, but open source seems like a terrible investment if you expect a return, but I think we definitely need to figure out how to fund open source, given how much benefit it brings to our industry.
I would be super interested in a Kickstarter for open source, though I wonder if it would suffer from the same issues that Kickstarter itself suffers from (lots of ambitious projects, most not being delivered on time).
> I would be super interested in a Kickstarter for open source, though I wonder if it would suffer from the same issues that Kickstarter itself suffers from (lots of ambitious projects, most not being delivered on time).
I signed up for your site already, I'm interested in seeing where this goes. I'm particularly interested in funding libraries, rather than finished products.
Kickstarter still does fine, despite this problem, but it has lead to people using Kickstarter as the final fundraising for manufacturing, which doesn't make a tonne of sense for software.
One option is a milestone-based system where the project author splits the work up into various chunks, and the funding gets released as they are done (as voted on by contributors within a few days of completion?) where if things start diverging too much from expectations the funding stops?
One thin that may be interesting besides developer-driven proposals, but community-driven requests. Sort of how bounties exist already, but potentially on a different scale. People could put their money where their mouth is and pre-commit to their dream open source self-hosted whatever. Maybe even pre-committing money to specific features.
Something like Patreon could exist for software people if people want to fund a maintainer, though that's less clear.
Thanks for signing up! You've raised more questions than I can answer but it gives things to think about.
I've thought about the milestone system (it was the first thing that came to my mind) but do consensus based software have unchanging requirements? More importantly how is consensus reached? I think that for smaller scope like libraries or plug-ins it makes sense where there is one clear purpose. ex) write a scraper plugin that returns data.
Community driven requests would most likely be function or feature requests. It's exactly how you've described where you can put up a bounty for specific features where a developer will come along and implement it. If it's not worth their time (amount of work is far more than the money raised) than a few things could happen:
- another developer could do it for the purpose of building a portfolio or gathering resumes etc.
- the requester/backer can advertise it to his peers or companies, if it gets enough backing it would entice more developers to work on it.
Finally, the Patreon model where a lone dev or a team will work on maintaining an open source project on an ongoing basis.
It gets me super excited just thinking about the possibilities but I'm grossly overlooking the pitfalls and challenges of bringing people together in the first place.
I'm going to do some brainstorming and maybe lay it out in a blog post this weekend.
Stranahan's did the same thing for a while when they were first starting out too. For me, it tasted kinda 'egg-y' and I hated it. Now that they have been out for a few years, their whiskeys are lot better. Something is lost in that 'accelerated' process that makes it taste not so good to me at least.
The TV show Moonshiners has been dealing with accelerated aging processes recently. The method used by a pair of the moonshiners was to highly electrically charge charred wood immersed in the alcohol.
At least according to the show, the two "inventors" had a patent on their method. They were allegedly getting two years of aging in two days.
I wouldn't imagine so. The mechanism of action for spirits here is that the ultrasound extracts the various flavor compounds from the wood much quicker than it normally takes the alcohol solution to without ultrasound. But aged cheese's flavor mostly comes from the action of mold and/or bacteria chemically altering the cheese. I can't imagine that blasting ultrasound into the cheese would accelerate this process, sadly.
And the next question: Can you do it yourself? The shops where I get my cheese from all seem to be afraid that properly aged cheese might explode when they switch the light on.
Amusing observation. Having had 10, 15, 20, and 100-year-old scotch, I must admit, I couldn't really tell the difference, other than price. Yeah, they tasted a bit different, but so do Aberfeldy and Ardbeg. I wouldn't say one is any better than the other though; unless you really like the smokey taste of old pianos, then Ardbeg is definitely the best.
If this had been a conclusion reached as a result of careful analysis, then I'd be interested. Relying on people to taste-test a difference is just a broadly pointless exercise I think, and doesn't really prove the conclusion the headline is selling.
"If this had been a conclusion reached as a result of careful analysis, then I'd be interested"
Ironically, we could say the same about your post ;-)
The following is only a link away:
"[..] This way, the results show that higher powers of ultrasound, of nearly 40 W/L, in addition with the movement of the spirit, improve the extraction of phenolic compounds in a 33.94%, after seven days of ageing. Then, applying Youden and Steiner’s experimental design, eight experiments of ageing were performed, and the samples obtained by this new method were analysed to obtain information related to their physicochemical and oenological characterisation in order to determine the experimental conditions that produce the best ageing results.[..]"
Since good taste is the goal, how else would you evaluate the results? As long as the taste testing was carried out properly (i.e. blinded, randomized), it's fine.
But what ancient lineage and obscure origin stories will you impress your friends and yourself with? The marketing is half the product with liquor, the only thing sold for human consumption not requiring an ingredient label.
There's an ISO standard for conducting these kinds of tests, and they apparently followed it. It's easy to think of perceptual tests that mitigate your concerns: for instance, you can triangle test.
I suspect that the time is a function of surface area. If instead of wood chips they used shavings, I'd bet that they could take the time down even further.